Art review: Small bear

IN the vaulted Marble Hall of Mount Stuart, the ceiling is decorated with all 49 constellations of the Northern hemisphere. Horatio Walter Lonsdale's design shows both the stars – each one picked out in crystal – and their allegorical representations: Orion, the Great Bear and so on.

The ceiling was commissioned by the third Marquess of Bute, who built this neo-Gothic palace, stinting on no detail, sparing no expense. He was a keen astronomer, though he readily blended this interest with astrology. The 12 astrological signs are represented in stained-glass windows just below the starred ceiling, while the ceiling of the master bedroom (now known as the Horoscope Room) is decorated with the astrological star chart for his birth.

As long as people have looked at the stars, they have found patterns in them, ascribed pictures to the patterns, drawn meanings from the pictures. It is one of the clearest indications of our need to find meaning in what we see. And we still do it. What Lonsdale did with his ceiling, contemporary artist Simon Patterson did in his seminal work The Great Bear, imposing constellations of postmodern "stars" on one of the great classics of modern pattern-making: the London Underground map.

This is the aspect of Mount Stuart to which German artist Katja Strunz has chosen to respond in this summer's residency. In one of the most innovative residencies in Scotland, Mount Stuart invites a contemporary artist to the Isle of Bute every summer to make work responding to the setting which will then be exhibited in the house, grounds or gallery space in the visitor centre.

Artists therefore have to find a way of working with (or around) the magnificence of Mount Stuart, its exhausting decorative detail, daunting art collection, colourful history and acres of scenic grounds. Perhaps as a result, it has engendered ambitious projects: Anya Gallaccio coloured a pine tree silver in the stately pinetum (it still has a ghostly sheen to it); Moyna Flannigan hung her fictional portraits next to Mount Stuart's Old Masters; Nathan Coley made his first "There will be no miracles here" sign for the grounds. Last year, Mark Neville explored – at times provocatively – the upstairs-downstairs relationship of the great house with regard to the local community.

Next to some of these projects, Katja Strunz's installation in the visitor centre gallery appears slight, its link to the surroundings tangential. This is reinforced by the fact that her assembly of sculptures is a new version of a work first shown at Krefeld, a work which fits the surroundings rather than responds to them.

Her assembly of toadstool-shaped sculptures made from found metal objects – serving dishes, ashtrays, a discarded cymbal – spill out of the gallery into the surrounding gardens in a formation suggestive of the Great Bear constellation. In the Marble Hall itself, she has requested a vitrine displaying part of Lonsdale's original plans, an explanatory text and a replica star.

Her sculptures have a homespun aesthetic and a quirky anthropomorphism: some are stately and aloof, others set at jaunty angles. Her wall-based sculptures based on groups of metal cubes and geometric ink-drawings are more hard-edged. Strunz's principal dialogue is with abstraction and constructivism, and in common with these traditions, her work gives little away.

The key to unlocking this body of work, if such a thing exists, is a found photograph from which Strunz takes the subtitle of the show. Taken in Nantes in 1929, it shows a group of men, women and children wearing what looks like a benign version of combat camouflage. They line up solemnly for the camera covered in leaves and foliage, while two of the younger members of the group hold a banner: "Je meurs ou je m'attache" ("I will die where I am closely connected" or "where I take root").

It sounds like a fatalistic statement; it could also be a political one. It says something about mankind's desperate desire to connect with the world, and to find meaning in our place in it. Whether dressing up as a bush or finding the outline of a bear in the stars, the impulse is the same.

Yet, where does this take us? The craftsmen who built Mount Stuart filled it with representations of nature. Strunz's version of The Great Bear is a representation of one of these, a mimic of a mimic exploring questions about mimicry. What would the craftsmen of a century ago, who carved leaves out of sandstone and sewed mice into the borders of tapestries, have made of it?

Contemporary art has largely shelved the idea of beauty to make work about concepts such as "representation" and "mimetics", and would have us believe this makes it more sophisticated. Yet Strunz's work at Mount Stuart feels oddly insubstantial. As always with minimalism, there is more to it than meets the eye, but against the multi-layered beauty of its surroundings its argument looks one-dimensional.

Meanwhile, at Edinburgh's Collective Gallery, two artists are responding to a very different building. In Commonwealth Suite, Jordan Baseman and artist Henna-Riikka Halonen were commissioned to make films about Edinburgh's Royal Commonwealth Pool, built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games and closing for refurbishment this month.

The Commonwealth Pool, designed by Edinburgh architects RMJM in the 1960s, is a classic piece of Scottish modernist architecture. Halonen was struck by the similarity of the building's interior, particularly its platforms and diving boards, to the set used for the Russian Constructivist play The Bathhouse, staged in 1930.

Mayakovsky's "drama in six acts with a circus and fireworks" was a satire on state bureaucracy, featuring a time machine rather than a bathhouse, but Halonen's reworked version, starring Edinburgh's Junior Diving club, is plotted around the swimming pool, from the boiler room to the public gallery, ending with an elegant sequence on the diving boards.

In fact, she turns the building into a kind of time machine. It is striking how easily the pool's interior evokes the Communist era, how her performers look like Soviet gymnasts, and the direct, austere style recalls the aesthetics of that particular branch of modernism.

By contrast, Jordan Baseman focuses his film on one regular user of the pool's gym, Ian Colquhoun, who lost his legs in a fire at the age of 24. The building, where he learned to swim as a child and played with his friends growing up (when it still had flumes), then came to play a crucial part in rebuilding his life, physically and psychologically.

While his candid, deadpan voiceover tells his story, images of flickering light on water depict something of his interior world. Because of his injuries, he can no longer swim, but a recurring dream of light on water comes to suggest acceptance, an affirmation of himself, in place of resentment. In telling the story of the building, Baseman has created a compelling contemporary portrait of a man's life.

• The Great Bear runs until 30 September (for more information see www.mountstuart.com); Commonwealth Suite runs until 19 July.

• Duncan Macmillan is at the Venice Biennale this week; read his report in The Scotsman on Friday.